1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of evaluating a value of reference information and an apparatus of evaluating a value of reference information.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Typically, in documents providing information such as articles, journals, and patent documents, there are other documents that the documents cite or reference. Here, “document” is a general term for papers, records and electronic files containing information. Hereinafter, reference information or a reference document includes both a document referenced for writing a certain document and a document an author acknowledged as a reference document. For example, when an author submits an article about a certain study to an academic journal, reference documents referenced in writing the document are generally listed in the bibliography and the like.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of a value of a reference document or reference information. For example, it is assumed that an author named Hong Gildong contributed an article A titled “Study of advanced information analysis” to the Journal of the Information Analysis Society, and the article A consists of an introduction, a body, a conclusion, and finally a bibliography listing 5 reference documents, for example.
Previously, a degree of influence or a value of a reference document for a certain document has been equally evaluated. In the above example, a degree of influence or a value of each of the reference documents 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for the article A may be evaluated as 1 or 1/5 (the number of a given reference document to the number of all of the reference documents). However, by evaluating a value, a degree of influence or importance of each of the reference documents as described above, it may not be possible to evaluate a respective value of each of the reference documents for an information document. Strictly speaking, in the above example in which all of the reference documents are equally evaluated as 1 or 1/5, such evaluation is not useful in determining which one of the reference documents is important. Therefore, a user may not be able to determine which of the reference documents is important when he references the reference documents through the information document.